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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria in September 2014, where I attended the FreeBSD DevSummit and EuroBSDcon 2014. I'm a GSoC student and it was my first DevSummit. I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip, Gavin Atkinson for an invitation to the DevSummit, Mariusz Zaborski for support during the conference, and the mentor of my project, Devin Teske, for directions.

I arrived in Sofia on Wednesday evening, found my Hill hotel, checked in, and dropped off my luggage. I tried to contact Mariusz, the only person I knew. It was too late for lounging about so I stayed for the rest of the day at the hotel.

The first day of the Developer Summit started with self-presentations and trying to divide participants into smaller groups. It didn’t happen and everybody stayed in the room for one track. It was the first time I could see who is who, because I knew only people’s nicks or names . That day we discussed the future of the 11.0 release, 10/40/100GigE, ports and packages, embedded systems, mainly ARM and MIPS, and tools and support for cross-compilation. That day I met some people: the first was Michał Dubiel from Semihalf. We talked about Network Virtualization, SDN, and OpenContrail. The next person was Daniel Peyrolon, another GSoC student. I showed him my project and he showed me his magic. During lunch break, Mariusz introduced me to Hiroki Sato. We talked about the organization of the conference from the organizers’ side.

The second day of the DevSummit started by dividing groups in two parts. The first track was about developer tools like Phabricator and Jenkins and DNS and DNSSEC on FreeBSD. The second track was about ASLR. I attended the first track. I tried to pass BSDA certificate, so I missed the most important aspects of the DNS session. After lunch break, we had a discussion about crypto algorithms and a documentation session. It was my first DevSummit, so I was only an observer. Next person who Mariusz introduced me to was Gavin Atkinson, but there was no time to talk, just say 'Hi'.

The main conference started on Saturday with Jordan Hubbard's keynote about the past and the future of FreeBSD. I stayed in this track for the next talks. Kris Moore talked about PC-BSD and features based on ZFS, such as snapshots, replication, and encrypted zfs-root with only one pool. Next talk which I attended was about implementation of ZFS. Kirk McKusick made the introduction to internal implementation. After lunch break I joined John-Mark Gurney’s talk about optimizing GELI performance. Results of speed benchmark are amazing. For the rest of the talks, I changed the room and attended Henning Brauer’s talk about OpenBGPD. He talked about the history of the open source implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol. Next, I changed the track the second time and joined Peter Hessler’s talk about routing domains. The last talk was about using QEMU and cross-compilation packages for the ARM architecture. Sean Bruno made a demonstration on how to use those tools. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the amazing Andy Tanenbaum’s talk. After the last speech, I found Gavin and we talked about my GSoC project, the documentation for it, and what I should do in the near future. He offered me his help and introductions to people from the community who could take a look at my code. That day I met Jakub Klama, who is also from Poland. He said 'Hi' in Polish and I was surprised. Jakub was the third FreeBSD GSoC student attending EuroBSDcon 2014. It was sad as I expected to meet more students.

During a social event I met with Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick. Of course, Mariusz was the middleman. Eric told us a lot of stories from his life, about the first steps of networking and transatlantic communication. He drew attention to students’ bad practices on memory management and how important it is. I talked with Kirk about my project and how GSoC looks from the organizational side.

The second day of EuroBSDcon was less busy for the people after the social event. I started with Baptiste Daroussin’s talk about cross building. I attended the LibreSSL and ASLR talks. Very interesting for me was the talk about OpenContrail and OpenStack for FreeBSD. Michał Dubiel described software architecture and support for OpenContrail and OpenStack in the FreeBSD world. The most interesting talk was about securing sensitive data at the
University of Oslo. Dag-Erling Smøgrav described the system they use. The keynote was very interesting too. Atanas Chobanov showed us how to use SecureDrop, Tails, and Tor for anonymously submitting documents. During the closing session, Deb Goodkin presented about the FreeBSD Foundation, and Shteryana Shopova and Paul Schenkeveld presented about the EuroBSD Foundation. After the closing session, we organized an unofficial social event.

I think that attending conferences is a huge motivation for work for new people. It was a great opportunity to meet people I had known only from the Internet. I hope I will be able to participate in DevSummits and BSD conferences again in the future.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation has been a long-time sponsor of events like the upcoming FreeBSD Developer and Vendor Summit. This year we would also like to thank Microsoft and RootBSD for their extended support of the event. Opportunities to bring the developer and vendor communities together to further the Project would not be possible without the support of companies like these two. Please take a minute and find out more about why these organizations are involved with the FreeBSD Project.

Microsoft's customers have been clear that they want a single hypervisor for their environments, whether they are running Windows, Linux or FreeBSD operating systems. Microsoft is committed to working with the FreeBSD Foundation to ensure that FreeBSD is a first-class guest operating system on Windows Server Hyper-V and is focused on improving reliability, performance and support of new Hyper-V features in our upcoming updated release of BSD Integration Services. Find out more here.

RootBSD is a provider of hosting services with an emphasis on the BSD family of operating systems. As users of FreeBSD ourselves, we believe it is important to contribute back to the community and do so by sponsoring services for individual developers as well as events such as the Developer's Summit. We are thrilled to be able to support the Silicon Valley Developer's Summit, as we've seen first hand the results that face-to-face meetings can have in sparking new ideas and discussions that might not happen through strictly online communication. Find out more about RootBSD here.

The vt(4) driver has been updated to save and restore keyboard mode and LED states when switching windows.

Several fixes to the SCTP protocol implementation.

A potential race condition in obtaining a file pointer has been corrected.

Fix ZFS ZVOL deadlock and rename issues.

Restore libopie.so ABI compatibility with 10.0-RELEASE.

Removed the last vestige of MD5 password hashes.

Several rc(8) script updates and fixes.

bsdinstall(8) has been updated to allow selecting local_unbound in the default services to enable at first boot.

Prevent ZFS leaking pool free space.

Fix rtsold(8) remote buffer overflow vulnerability. [SA-14:20]

Fix routed(8) remote denial of service vulnerability. [SA-14:21]

Fix memory leak in sandboxed namei lookup. [SA-14:22]

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j. [SA-14:23]

Fix an issue where a FreeBSD virtual machine provisioned in the Microsoft Azure service does not recognize the second attached disk on the system.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC3 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

We were thrilled to be a Gold Sponsor and to attend EuroBSDCon 2014 held in Sofia, Bulgaria September 27-28. We were also a sponsor of the developer summit. The conference was well attended, with over 225 people there.

Students working together on a project

Not only did we sponsor four FreeBSD contributors to attend the conference, but with help from Google providing women computer scientists scholarships, I saw more women attending this conference than I had ever seen before.

I attend these events to touch base with the FreeBSD user and developer community. It’s a chance for

me to find out what people are working on, what kind of help they could use from the Foundation, feedback on what we can be doing to support the FreeBSD Project and community, and what features/functions people want supported in FreeBSD. In addition, the other Foundation members, who are active developers, writers, and teachers in the FreeBSD world, attend, not only to connect with the community, but also go to sessions to get a more in-depth understanding of new features and functions, as well as learn what others are working on.

During the event, we held our fall fundraising campaign and raised over $2,000 in donations! One lucky donor won a copy of the newly released Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd Edition). Thank you to everyone who donated.

It really was a great opportunity to meet FreeBSD contributors from around the world. Attendees were mostly from Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Russia, and Germany. There were also people from Japan, Canada, and the US. Every time I attend one of these BSD-related conferences, I’m blown away by the excitement and passion these people have and share. I’m full of admiration as I watch these dedicated people interact with each other, sharing information on their projects, helping each other with their work, and inspiring new people to get involved. I love watching the newbies interact with the more seasoned FreeBSD contributors (Rockstars!), as the latter instills a sense a pride, curiosity, and engagement in FreeBSD. It’s a chance for people to work face-to-face, get inspired, and learn about areas to get involved with. So much work gets accomplished at these conferences.

Kirk about to give a presentation

We had 7 Foundation board and staff members attend the conference. Kirk McKusick gave a two day tutorial on the FreeBSD Kernel Internals based on the newly released 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. He also gave a talk on the implementation of ZFS in FreeBSD. Erwin Lansing chaired the DNS and Ports sessions of the developer summit, while Ed Maste gave a presentation on the current state of the LLDB debugger in FreeBSD. On the FreeBSD Journal front, George Neville-Neil was able to recruit more material.

The Foundation also held a board meeting which focused on advocacy in Europe and how to approach more European companies to help facilitate collaboration with the Project, as well as seeking more donations from that part of the world. We held many discussions with FreeBSD developers on current and future projects, increasing efforts for greater collaboration on graphics stack maintenance and a variety of technical topics.

Working the FreeBSD Foundation table

Overall, it was another successful conference and we are looking forward to participating in next year’s European conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Monday, October 20, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation was a gold sponsor of EuroBSDCon 2014, which was held in Sofia, Bulgaria in September. The Foundation also sponsored Bjoern Heidotting to attend the conference, who provides the following trip report:

Since I'm fairly new to the FreeBSD community I would like to introduce myself first. My name is Bjoern Heidotting, I live in Germany, I work as a system administrator and I'm a FreeBSD user since 2006 and a contributor since 2012. I mostly contribute patches for the German documentation in the doc-tree. Why do I contribute? Well, the short version is that I simply wanted to give something back to FreeBSD and the community.

Thanks to Benedict Reuschling, who invited me, and the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to attend the DevSummit and the conference at EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sofia.

I arrived at Sofia airport on Wednesday and I took a taxi to get to my hotel the Best Western Expo, directly located at the IEC where the conference was held. However, the taxidriver decided to take me on a sightseeing tour through the city of Sofia. But after 1,5 hours I finally arrived at the hotel. The actual time to get from the airport to my hotel is about 10 minutes. Fortunately taxis are cheap in Bulgaria compared to Germany. And the city is really, really worth seeing.

Later that day, I met Daniel Peyrolon, a GSoC student with whom I shared a room. We decided to take dinner together and started getting to know each other. Afterwards, we socialized with some other FreeBSD people at the hotel bar.

On Thursday the DevSummit started with every attendee and developer introducing himself. Then some interesting topics and roadmaps were discussed for the upcoming 11.0 release, as well as other topics such as ASLR, UEFI, 10G Ethernet, just to name a few. It was a very interesting brainstorming with valuable input from all attendees. Since it was my first time at a DevSummit, I was impressed to see how fast these people can fill a bunch of foils with topics and ideas. Awesome!

After lunch a small group, including me, sat together in another room where I started to work on several patches for the Handbook. In the evening we had dinner at Lebed Restaurant. A very nice location. This is where I first met Deb Goodkin from the Foundation. She was the one I talked to prior to the conference and she brought Daniel and me together. Thank you Deb. It was very nice meeting her.

On Friday I mostly worked on a big patch for the network-servers section in the Handbook. I also met Beat Gaetzi while catching fresh air outside and we talked about our roles in the Project and what we do. After lunch the documentation topic started, which I was very interested in. We talked about issues on the website, Handbook sections, etc. The details of the session can be found on the wiki.

In the evening we had dinner at "The Windmill" and I met Henning Brauer from the OpenBSD project. It was really fun talking to him. Man, this guy can tell crazy stories.

Saturday and Sunday were conference days with one interesting talk chasing the next. All the talks were great, altough I had some favorites, including "Snapshots, Replication, and Boot-Environments" by Kris Moore, "Introducing ASLR in FreeBSD" by Shawn Webb, and "Securing sensitive & restricted data" by Dag-Erling Smorgrav. One of the highlights for me was the social event in Hotel Balkan on Saturday. Again, meeting the people behind the email addresses and talking to them was a great experience.

A big thanks goes out to Shteryana Shopova and her crew for organizing this great event.

Fix XHCI driver for devices which have more than 15 physical root HUB ports.

Fix old iSCSI initiator to work with new CAM locking.

Fix page length reported for Block Limits VPD page.

Add QCOW v1 & v2 support to mkimg(1).

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC2 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

A bug that would cause all processes to appear to have the parent PID of '1' has been fixed.

Various updates to bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8).

The Hyper-V KVP (key-value pair) driver has been added, and enabled by default on amd64 and i386 architectures.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC1 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Friday, October 3, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is excited to be participating in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference to be held in Phoenix, AZ on October 8-10. As many of you know, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computing, inventor of the first compiler, and the first person to record a (literal) bug. This year's annual conference in her honor has a full registration of 8,000 women computing technologists from all over the world.

The Foundation is a Silver non-profit sponsor for this event and will have a booth in the Expo area. In addition to informational brochures and Foundation pens, we'll be giving away some stickers created for this event. The stickers say "I choose FreeBSD because I know my ability to create the future has nothing to do with my gender and everything to do with my skills".

As part of this year's Grace Hopper Open Source Day on October 8, Dru Lavigne will be presenting "An Introduction to FreeBSD" at 14:00 in rooms South 164-166.

Shteryana Shopova will be hosting a lunchtime table topic on FreeBSD at table #12 on October 9 from 12:45 to 15:30.

Registration has closed for this event as it has reached its maximum capacity. However, if you know a woman technologist who is attending, let her know about the FreeBSD booth, presentation, and lunchtime table topic.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a collaboration with Cavium Inc. to develop and deliver the first ARMv8 reference design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System based on the ThunderX™ workload optimized processor family. Find out more at here.